Revisiting the Clark/Van Til Controversy, Part 2

Psalm 145:3 (KJV 1900)

Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; And his greatness is unsearchable.

"Hence may be inferred the incomprehensibility of God. [Charnock here refers to the preceding exposition on the doctrine of omnipresence].  He that fills heaven and earth cannot be contained in anything;  he fills the understanding of men, the understandings of angels, but is comprehended by neither; it is a rashness to think to find out any bounds of God; there is no measuring of an infinite Being; if it were to be measured it were not infinite; but because it is infinite, it is not to be measured. . . . We know there is no number so great, but another may be added to it; but no man can put it into practice, without losing himself in a maze of figures.  What is the reason we comprehend not many, nay, most things in the world?  partly from the excellency of the object, and partly from the imperfection of our understandings.  How can we then comprehend God, who exceeds all, and is exceeded by none; contains all, and is contained by none; is above our understanding, as well as above our sense? as considered in himself infinite; as considered in comparison with our understandings, incomprehensible;  who can, with his eye, measure the breadth, length and depth of the sea, and at one cast, view every dimension of the heavens?" 

Stephen Charnock.  The Existence and Attributes of God.  Vol. 1.  1853. Reprint.  (Grand Rapids:  Baker Books, 1996).  Pp. 394-395.

The problem of analogy as defined by the late Dr. Cornelius Van Til is associated with a doctrine of God that emphasizes total transcendence rather than a doctrine of God where God can actually unveil Himself through special revelation.  In my last post I did not complete my thoughts because of a time constraint.  Be that as it may, I am going to continue my critique of the Reformed Forum video about the Clark/Van Til controversy as it was recounted by Dr. K. Scott Oliphint, who teaches systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadephia, Pennsylvania.

You will also remember that Dr. Oliphint was charged with teaching an unconfessional view of the doctrine of God when he asserted that God added ectypal, iconic knowledge to Himself in eternity prior to creation so that God could relate to creation after the ex nihilo creation of the universe in providential time.  (See:  Oliphint's Covenantal Properties and A Critical Review of God with Us).  Ironically, in this discussion Oliphint accuses Dr. Clark of disguising his true views and then "developing his views in a more extreme way . . . that was different from the initial discussion."  (Oliphint, minute mark 9:34-11:30).  But it is Oliphint who has over time developed a more extreme view of God's transcendence such that to recover any actual relationship between God and His creation Oliphint has to make changes to God's being by adding so-called "covenantal properties" to God's archetypal being such that God has two sources of being:  1) archetypal and 2) ectypal.  In other words, Oliphint is essentially proposing that there are two different beings of God, one archetypal and the other ectypal.

I did a computer search on Francis Turretin's Elenctic Theology (3 vols.) and found that the terms ectypal and archetypal occur in only a couple of brief sections:

VI. True theology is divided into: (1) infinite and uncreated, which is God’s essential knowledge of himself (Mt. 11:27) in which he alone is at the same time the object known (epistēton), the knowledge (epistēmōn), and the knower (epistēmē), and that which he decreed to reveal to us concerning himself which is commonly called archetypal; and (2) finite and created, which is the image and ectype (ektypon) of the infinite and archetypal (prōtotypou) (viz., the ideas which creatures possess concerning God and divine things, taking form from that supreme knowledge and communicated to intelligent creatures, either by hypostatical union with the soul of Christ [whence arises “the theology of union”]; or by beatific vision to the angels and saints who walk by sight, not by faith, which is called “the theology of vision”; or by revelation, which is made to travellers [viz., to those who have not yet reached the goal and is called “the theology of revelation”] or the stadium).

Francis Turretin.  Elenctic Theology.  "First Topic:  Theology".  Vol. 1., section 4.  First edition in French, 17th century. Translated by George Musgrave.  Edited by James T. Dennison, Jr.  3rd edition.  (Phillipsburg:  Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1997).  P. 39.

Another brief mention is in regard to God's moral law:

4. From the conformity of the moral law with the eternal law of God. VI. Fourth, the moral law (which is the pattern of God’s image in man) ought to correspond with the eternal and archetypal law in God, since it is its copy and shadow (aposkimation), in which he has manifested his justice and holiness. Hence we cannot conform ourselves to the image of God (to the imitation of which Scripture so often exhorts us) except by regulating our lives in accordance with the precepts of this law. So when its observation is enjoined, the voice is frequently heard, “Be ye holy, for I am holy.” Now this law is immutable and perpetual. Therefore the moral law (its ectype) must necessarily also be immutable.

Turretin, Vol. 2, p. 19.  "Eleventh Topic:  The Law of God." 

What astounds me is how self-avowed Evangelical Calvinists can take a few brief comments from Turretin and twist those comments into an almost open endorsement of outright neo-orthodoxy?  The Van Tilian school of theology at Westminster Theological Seminary now outright denies that the Bible is propositional revelation and instead advocates for the rejection of logic and the acceptance of a dialectical view of Scripture as an "analogical" revelation and proposes a revisionist view of the Westminster Confession of Faith as a system of analogical theology.  The premise behind this distinction is that the word of God only exists in the archetypal mind of God, which is totally unknowable to created humans even by divine revelation.  Man can know nothing God knows whatsoever.  The only way man can know revelation from God is by ectypal knowledge and analogical knowledge.  Even Scott Oliphint realizes the problems that this view causes so he is distancing himself from the term analogical and instead wants to refer to a difference between aseity and iconic revelation. 

A good example of this Barthian dialectical approach to the doctrine of divine revelation according to the students of Cornelius Van Til is Oliphint's claim that we cannot get to the word of God from a human perspective:

Jared Oliphint: (minute mark 38:20 and following)  ...  Clark ... had a specific view on logic and how it relates to . . . uh . . . knowing anything and you know this . . . it always . . . um . . . brings up the question of how is logic and God related to each other... um ... You know some people go so far as to say that God is confined by logic but that's o.k. because it's part of His character.  Yah, my general question is how are we supposed to think about logic . . . um . . . even in saying that I know that it's defined in a hundred different ways by a thousand different people ... um... like ... Can we compare Van Til and let's just say Reformed theology's approach to the role of logic and the use of logic in theology and philosophy even ... uh... compared to Clark.

Scott Oliphint:  Yah.  Yah.  I do some of this in Reasons for Faith and go through it and basically borrow it from the Scholastics and I borrow some of it from Turretin, whose excellent exposition is pretty good on that.  So again so whatever I am gonna say is not ... is not new in terms of Reformed theology.  It's basically what we've held historically but um...  Just to put it in the negative, I don't know what God's logic would be if He had logic because if logic is the science of inference God doesn't have any because He doesn't infer anything.  Well maybe it's just the making of distinctions.  Well, how does God make distinctions in eternity relative to exhaustive knowledge.  What does that look like? because we hold to God's simplicity, that is there aren't any parts in God.  So we ...uh... despite the fact that there are no parts in God we still understand God to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  ...

Camden Bucey:  With real distinctions in the Godhead.

Scott Oliphint:  Yah, but what does that look like in terms of our understanding.  And see, what the church has said is you can't get there from here.  Uh, that there is going to be a mystery.  Van Til mentions in ... uh... Intro to Systematic Theology ... He quotes from an article of Clark's in Evangelical Quarterly where Clark claims to have solved the problem of sovereignty...between God's sovereignty and human responsibility.  He solved this.  It's not a mystery.  Uh, I think when you begin to go down that road, you're getting yourself close to a pagan understanding of what logic is meant to do.  Because whenever you have the Creator and the creature meeting in any way there's going to be mystery.  So better to us Bavinck's line--all theology, all dogmatics is ultimately a mystery than to use Clark's line in the beginning was Logic and Logic was with God Logic was God.  [John 1:1].  I don't know what that would mean in the mind of God.  He doesn't infer anything and whatever distinctions are there are identical to Him. [Quote ends at 40:57

To be sure Gordon H. Clark did not reject the proposition that there are unresolved paradoxes in the Bible and in the Christian doctrinal system.  The difference between Clark and the Van Til school is that he advocated that there are solutions to paradoxes, which he defined as charley horses between the ears.  Van Til's followers adamantly deny logic and advocate for contradiction as their methodology. 

The answer to Scott Oliphint's assertion that God does infer anything is simple. God IS Logic.  If Oliphint accepts the doctrine of divine simplicity, as he claims he does,  then he ought to know that God not only knows all the inferences but He also knows all the propositions in the system since God is simple.  All that God knows is of His essence as who God is.  Unfortunately, Van Til's side rejects logic outright while affirming that logic is created by God and to be used as mere human logic.

Clark's rejection of Van Til's neo-orthodoxy is simple.  Two parallel lines never intersect at any single point.  So if ectypal knowledge and archetypal knowledge never intersect at any single point, it follows logically from the Van Tilian perspective that truth is two-fold and that human truth is not God's truth and God's truth is not human truth.  Van Til's view opens the door to saying that the Bible is not God's truth but only human truth.  And since human truth is always in flux, the Bible itself may just be another human book if, to quote Oliphint, "We cannot get there from here."

Dr. Clark, on the other hand, asserted that the Bible is the word of God, not just an analogical "interpretation" of God's archetypal knowledge.  The Bible is univocally the very words of God.  (2 Timothy 3:16).

See:  Part 1 and Part 3.